The present invention concerns a system for polling various status indications of one or more circuit boards in an electronic system.
There are many known electronic systems which are packaged in a configuration which comprises several different printed circuit boards interconnected by insertion into a common backplane or backpanel. Each circuit board may be of a different physical and/or functional type. For example, in a data processing system the boards may comprise a CPU board, memory board, memory controller board, terminal controller board, communications board, service system board, power supply board, etc.
It is common in the electronic industry to make hardware revisions to an equipment model following its first production release. Such revisions may be made for various purposes such as to correct errors in the original version, to make functional improvements, to expand upon original functions, to utilize newer, alternative, improved, and/or less expensive circuit components, and so on.
With particular regard to a business which primarily leases, rather than sells, electronic equipment, when old leased equipment is returned to the manufacturer/lessor and is upgraded to have the operational capabilities of newer manufactured equipment, many substantial hardware revisions may be made to such old equipment. It is highly desirable to provide to a service technician the most precise identity possible of the equipment to be serviced.
To service and maintain electronic equipment, it is known to utilize either a built-in or remote service system for the purposes of conducting a self-test on the major system functions and for providing an indication of whether the equipment is operating correctly or not.
In a service environment involving a large number of complex electronic systems having various internal functional configurations and various manufacturing or remanufacturing dates, the proper diagnosing and servicing of such systems poses considerable problems in terms of informing the built-in or remote service system about the identity and operational status of the various system boards. For example, whether a service status inquiry is initiated from a local or remote service terminal, such terminal has to know what types of electronic boards it is examining in order to know whether they are operating properly. Also the service terminal has to know the manufacturing date, manufacturing revision number, or equivalent of each electronic board it examines.
As for the actual indication of the operational status of the electronic system boards or components, the range of sophistication is broad and may range, for example, from a circuit which merely activates an error light or audible warning to one which performs error-logging, records various performance statistics, and reads and writes data to registers or memory on the boards.
As electronic systems become increasingly complex, the costs of servicing such systems are constantly rising. It would obviously be of considerable commercial value to be able to significantly improve the serviceability of such equipment. Significant improvements include, for example, reducing the time required for diagnosis and error identification, providing more accurate identification of the sources of errors, and providing more accurate identification of the categories of errors.
It would also be desirable to be able to issue certain commands to the board--for example, to reset either the board or the entire system upon command from not only the local terminal but especially the remote terminal, after an error has occurred which has halted operation of the system.